• • Home
  • Undergraduate Study
• • Postgrad English
  • Postgrad Creative Writing
• • Research
  • Staff
• • News & Events
  • Contact Us
• • Resources for Current Students

Undergraduate Menu

Search using keywords/tags or full text search.

ENGL 380: Between the Acts

Course Convenor: Prof John Schad

Seminar Time and Venue: Thursday 9am – 11am, Bowland North SR15 (Term 1)

Course Aims and Objectives:
The course will begin with writing that looks back to the First World War and end with writing that anticipates the Second World War. In between the students will explore and interrogate the inter-war ‘moment’ through close attention to a number of other texts. The course will focus on many of the great themes of the period such as exile, unemployment, Englishness, eugenics, militarisation, and political commitment, as well as many of the great cultural motifs of the period such as borders, radios, planes, cars, trains, cameras and telephones. Close attention will also be paid to many of the great intellectual debates of the period such as the nature of history, the role of the State in everyday life, and the place of literary experimentation in time of war.  The course will not, though, be limited to what these texts are ‘about’ but will also attend to what these texts ‘do.’ In other words, we shall explore how inter-war writing both reflects the period and indeed participates in the period. The students will, then, be expected to understand the ways in which the texts under consideration exist not only ‘between the acts’ but are themselves acts – acts not only of mourning and warning but also agitation, provocation, resistance, despair, and even (therefore) hope.  

Assessment:
1 x 5,000-word essay (100%)

Submission Deadline:
12 noon Monday Week 1 / Term 2

Contact Hours:
1 seminar of 2 hours per week (with exception of Independent Study Week)

Learning Outcomes:
It is intended that by the end of the course the students will have acquired:

• a detailed knowledge of inter-war writing
• a keen appreciation of how the history of the period bears upon literary texts
• a well-developed facility for close reading of inter-war writing

week one - forgotten
D.H. Lawrence, ‘England, My England’ (1921) [will be made available on Moodle]
AND
Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Garden Party’(1922) [will be made available on Moodle]

week two  - dead
Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930)

week three – astonished
Arnold Bennett, The Pretty Lady (1918)

week four - accused
Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)

week five - committed
W.H.Auden, Collected Shorter Poems [will announce which particular poems nearer time]

week six –
reading week

week seven – tutored
Edward Upward, Journey to the Border (1938) [available as separate book or in collection called The Railway Accident and Other Stories]

week eight – committed
Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal (1938)

week nine  - stranded
Henry Green, Party Going (1939)

week ten - suspended
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941)

Back to: ENGL 379

Forward to: ENGL 385

Courses Index